Dr. Muhammad Maroof Shah
What is the common problem of religion, philosophy and higher art and literature? One could well reply in the words of the Buddha that it is “suffering and the cessation of suffering.” Why are we born and why do we die? Why have we been hurled into this vale of tears? What is the end of all human endeavors? For the sake of what do we consent to live and suffer? What great object irresistibly drives man on and on and gives direction and meaning to everything? What is that vision that the artist perceives and attempts to communicate? What constitutes man’s deliverance? Where is the final rest or the object of our love and how to seek it? All these questions are reducible to the question of suffering and its cessation. Let us first note the extent and forms of suffering and evil we encounter to prepare for the next step of conquest over it.
The World of Suffering
To give an idea of the enormity of magnitude of evil and suffering, we shall turn first of all to religion. It is religion, though paradoxical it may seem to its critics, that makes existence of suffering and moral evil the first noble truth. If transcendent unity of religions is correct, as the perennialist scholars such as Frithjof Schuon (Isa Nuruddin) argue, it implies that theistic religions too are compatible with evil and they have no interest in hiding this painful fact; they too can see it as noble truth and make its appropriation raison d’etre of itself and proceed from this ab initio like Buddhism. For the Buddha life is suffering. To quote him:
Now, this is the noble truth concerning suffering. Birth is painful, decay is painful, disease is painful, death is painful, union with the unpleasant is painful; painful is the separation from the pleasant and any craving that is unsatisfied that too is painful. In brief the five aggregates which spring from attachment are painful (i.e., body, feeling, perception, will and reason). 1 “What think ye disciples, whether is more, the water which is in four great oceans, or the tears which have flown from you and have been shed by you, while ye strayed and wandered on this long pilgrimage and sorrowed and wept, because that was your portion which ye abhorred and that which ye loved was not your portion ….
On the omnipotence of death the Buddha says (and Russell seems to echo him in his oft quoted lines on the tragic end of the universe), “Not in the sky nor in the depths of ocean, nor having entered the caverns of the mountain, nay such a place isn’t to be found in the world where a man might dwell without being overpowered by death.” Radhakrishnan thus comments on this: “The most moral hero and the greatest work of art must one day be cast down and consumed in death. All things pass away. Our dreams and hopes. Our fears and desires – all of them will be forgotten as though they had never been.” “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” cried the author of Ecclesiastics. The total picture of life sometimes seems too painful for contemplation; life depends on our not knowing it too well. Schopenhauer, who is supposed to represent the Buddhist attitude in presenting the stark reality of suffering, writes:
If we should bring clearly to a man’s sight the terrible sufferings and miseries to which his life is constantly exposed, he would be seized with horror; and if we were to conduct the confirmed optimist through the hospitals, infirmaries and surgical operating rooms, through the prisons , torture chambers and slave kennels over battle fields and places of execution; if we were to open to him all the dark abodes of misery, where it hides itself from the glance of cold curiosity and finally allow him to look into the starving dungeons of Ugolino, he too would understand at last the nature of this “best of all possible worlds”. For whence did Dante take the materials of his hell but from our actual world? And yet he made a proper hell out of it. But when on the other hand , he came to describe heaven and its delights , he had an insurmountable difficulty before him, for our world has no materials at all for this …. Every epic and dramatic poem can represent a struggle, an effort, a fight for happiness, never enduring and complete happiness itself.
For him “optimism is a bitter mockery of men’s woes.” In brief, “the nature of life throughout presents itself to us as intended and calculated to awaken the conviction that nothing at all is worth our striving, our efforts or struggles; that all good things are vanity, the world in all its ends bankrupt and life is a business which doesn’t cover expenses.” For Plato all philosophy is a meditation on death. Will Durant sees in the fear of death the final cause of religion. “Madness,” says Schopenhauer, “comes as a way to avoid the memory of suffering.” For him happiness is the cessation of suffering and not something positive. Andre Gide says, “Sometimes humanity strikes me as so miserable that the happiness of a few seems impious.”
Christianity is based on recognizing our fallen condition, our sinful, wretched, miserable condition. Christ is relevant only after this prior fall; he can redeem only the fallen man. All Nature and the animal world shares in this fall. The whole Nature needs redemption according to the early Christian fathers. Modern man experiences the agonizing reality of absence of God and omnipresence of the devil. The death of God implies the death of divine goodness. The saying of Christ that God is love, conquering evil by love was never as relevant as in the present time.
The worst feature of human suffering is the chaotic nature of its distribution. Suffering lives all; it doesn’t discriminate between the innocent and the guilty. If strong men alone were sufferers, we would comfort ourselves by noting the gladness of little children; but children suffer, often with an intensity which seems too awful. Dostoevsky’s Ivan’s agonizing protest against all theodicies in The Brother’s Karamazov is based on the suffering of innocents. If thou go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth,” then truth, he protests, is not worth such a price.” Eternal harmony, Ivan declares in an impassioned fit, is not worth the unexpiated and unatoned for tears of even one tortured child in an outhouse or a slum. These tears, Ivan demands, must be atoned here and now on this earth and not in some remote infinite time and space.
If we suffer only “to manure the soil of the future harmony for somebody else,” it is an outrageous world that can’t be accepted. Ivan renounces the higher harmony altogether. This mad anguished rebellion has been echoed in twentieth century literature and theists have been hard put to pacify Ivan. For Ivan there can be no humanly discoverable explanation or justification for it. Ivan becomes a rebel because of this. No future happiness for him can annul the past unmerited suffering. Maugham in his Summing Up says that he saw a child die of meningitis and then on became deaf to all theodicy. Modernist sentimentalism has becomes a great stumbling block in his understanding of the issue of evil. Neither the sacred scriptures nor the generality of great philosophers, litterateurs, and psychologists have a high opinion of sorry state of mankind in general – all of them testify to the wretched or fallen state of humanity, to the fact of man being created in trouble. It is only the genius of religion that sees redeeming grace or silver lining in this dark cloud of human misery. Religion is, however, consistently hopeful regarding man’s ultimate destiny but that doesn’t mean that it refuses to face the present predominance of evil in life. Hardy quotes Sophocles to the effect that life offers the only good of knowing that life isn’t worth living or repeating.
History has been dubbed as nothing but “a narrative of misery,” “a bunk,” “a highway of despair,” “the great dust heap,” “little more than the register of crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind,” “that terrible mill in which sawdust rejoins sawdust,” and “useless trifle.” Life has been described as “a blister on top of a tumor and a boil on top of that,” “a strange disease … with its sick hurry, its divided aims,” “a bridge of groans across a stream of tears,” “ a tale / told by an idiot / full of sound and fury / signifying nothing,” “a temporary ill, to be soon cured by that old doctor, Death,” “a futile passion,” “a cheat,” “the pursuit of the superfluous,” “a jest,” “a bore,” “an unprofitable disturbance in the calm of non-existence,” “essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity… and exploitation,” “incurable loneliness of soul,” “one long dirty trick” to quote only a few of the countless such expressions.
Man is described by some great religious and secular authorities as “lusting, killing, fighting animal,” “a confounded, corrupt and poisoned nature, both in body and soul,” “a pugnacious animal,” “a wolf,” “false, dissembling, subtle, cruel and inconstant,” “a devourer, one of another,” “God’s mistake,” a condemnable clay.” Most of those indictments are from religious authorities (theists) themselves. There is no denying of the fact that this is only one side of the story and that great tributes to greatness, goodness and grandeur of man have also been paid. But we all know, in the heart of hearts, which is the more real side of the story, more realist interpretation of raw experience. It is humanism and not religion which has denied the reality of man’s fallen and corrupt nature or sin and believed in man’s perfectibility, a heaven on this earth and man usurping Godhead. The problem is that even a single blot, a single dark spot on the sun of existence, a single cry from a child may be enough to discredit theism according to its critics.
Author can be mailed at Marooof123@gmail.com
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